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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, property, aquatic and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.